Chapter Text
Her whole life is a bit of a compromise. Keyleth has always felt pulled in too many directions. Half girl, half animal, half god. Less than the difference of her parts.
In the other place, this dark plane between life and death, she’s pulled hard into all of them at the same time, so hard, she feels the tether snap a bit, the little knot in the center that was the most of her pulled too taut, so small it disappears.
Stumbling back up to the castle in Whitestone, she tries to find it again, but can’t.
It’s been weeks. She’s lost count of the number but not of the magnitude, longer than days, shorter than months. Weeks of being stretched thinner than air, weeks of running and hiding and fighting and worse sitting like a black pit in her soul. She can’t think about it. Not yet.
The animal is hungry, parched and famished, always. The girl is shell-shocked, terrified of the familiarity of the world around her, less like it will disappear beneath her, more like it will warp and turn to eat her. The god is quiet, tired, exhausted, empty.
She heaves her aching body through the halls of Whitestone Castle, not sure where in the world she’s even going. She doesn’t even know if the Briarwoods are really gone, if her friends are here, if she’s hopped out of hell and back into a frying pan. This was just the first place she could think to go, exactly where she left from like maybe no time will have passed, like maybe it will undo the weeks, like maybe she can erase the whole thing.
The halls are quiet but warm. She doesn’t see anyone, familiar or otherwise, but the dark foreboding that permeated the air of Whitestone when she was last here is gone. It’s night, but the moonlight is soft, the stars seem hopeful. Or maybe she’s just grateful to see the stars again. There were many times in the past weeks that she thought she never would.
After minutes of wandering the labyrinth of the first floor, she hears voices. Too muffled to identify, but the girl in her at least is desperate enough for help from anyone, is so starved of other people and things that won’t instantly try to kill her, she turns immediately.
She doesn’t know how bad she looks, just feels the blood dried and flaking on her skin. That last attack, it had been one of the worst. She’d been shunted out of Minxie and pummeled into the ground by too many of those winged monsters to count. She thinks she’s still bleeding from the places where their talons had sliced into her back as she ran as hard and fast as she could. She had barely lost them, tucking herself into a corner of one of the empty dark houses closer to the tower in the center of the city and holding her breath to stay quiet even as her lungs burned. She scraped together every inch of her magic and reached and reached and reached like she had been for all the weeks.
It worked this time, something in her power sparking and exploding as she felt herself spirited through the space between planes before being dropped to her knees in the center of Whitestone.
Safe. Probably.
She hadn’t thought about cleaning up or sending a message ahead or anything really. Those were Keyleth thoughts, center thoughts, human thoughts.
It’s been weeks of those being shaken out of her. All that’s left had moved on autopilot.
Is still moving on autopilot as she turns the corner and heads towards the voices.
The door of the room at the end of the hall is open, warm firelight spilling out, casting shadows in the hall.
She sees Vax first, in the doorway, always on the edges and in the corners, and just the shape of his silhouette stops her heart. Weeks ago, he had said he loved her, he had kissed her, and then she had been sucked into another plane. She can’t bring herself to walk any faster, she can barely feel her feet as they push off the hardwood floors, but she feels herself pulled towards him, towards home.
He’s listening intently to the conversation in the room, the faint murmur of it is still so familiar to her, it tickles something in her brain, something starting to slowly wake up inside her. The conversation must be intense because he’s locked into it. She gets within feet of the door before he notices, his spine stiffening, his hand going for his belt as he turns, fast as ever.
The animal wants to flinch and brace. The girl doesn’t know how to, not when it’s Vax.
His eyes land on her and his jaw drops slack, a harsh wet gasp pulled through his parted lips. It almost surprises her that he recognizes her. She doesn’t know what she looks like, but she knows something inside feels different, different enough that everyone should be able to see.
“Kiki?” he says. It’s the first word she’s heard in weeks. It takes a second to remember he’s referring to her.
He jerks a step towards her, his hand reaching out for her immediately, instinctively. It quivers in the air like nothing she’s ever seen from him and stops, frozen in place like he can’t quite bring himself to touch her and shatter the illusion.
She, on the other hand, can’t stop, knows the second that she stops walking forward she’ll probably die, held together and up at this point by her steady momentum alone. She keeps walking until she crashes into him, and sure enough, her knees are shaking so hard she almost collapses immediately.
“Keyleth,” he breathes, his voice is a desperate gasp. His hands catch her, one at her waist, one at her bicep, holding so gently, like cupping water. It quiets all the dissonant voices in her head, a balm that spills through the places where his skin touches hers. It feels like safety, like home, like nothing hurts and she won’t fall ever again. He sways them further into the room and for a moment she can’t see anything, blinded by the fireplace at the back wall, brighter than anything she’s seen in weeks.
It takes a few blinks before she can focus again, but his face is still there, so close to hers, eyes so wide, tears leaking out of the corners, curving along his cheeks.
“Hi,” she says, because that’s what you’re supposed to say when you see people. Her voice feels and sounds like shards of glass in her throat.
She’s so thirsty.
The room behind Vax explodes with noise, and the animal wants to bear her teeth and the girl wants to run and hide and the god perks her head up and considers searching for some magic way to silence the whole world for a moment.
Stop, stop, stop, she tries in her head, so quiet and tiny in the center of it, strained by the strength of each side as it pulls at her.
Before she can do anything more, she’s pulled a few inches out of Vax’s hands and into a fierce hug. A shock of white. The smell of oil and gunpowder. It hurts a little to be squeezed so tight when her body still aches, but the pain is good, it sharpens the world to focus. It pushes her together more, towards the middle.
“Hi,” she chokes out again, because that’s right. Her brain can’t really remember anything else she’s supposed to say or be just yet, let alone what to do with her hands and arms right now, but that’s one right step.
“I knew it,” Percy whispers harshly. “I knew you’d….” He cuts himself off with a sharp laugh.
The other voices are loud enough that they bleed in.
“See, I told you holding a funeral would be tacky.”
“Well, we didn’t know, Scanlan.”
“I thought you said we would know for sure if she died.”
Suddenly, the voices are approaching, along with bodies and hands and more noise of movement and life that are alien to her.
“What happened, Keyleth?”
“Yeah, where were you?”
“How did you get back?”
“Maybe back off a bit, Freddie, she looks like she can barely breathe,” Vax’s voice is the softest, still breaking over every other word, even as he continues on like he isn’t crying softly. He steps in closer behind her and it’s a lot of body heat and a lot of movement and it takes everything in her to keep the animal down.
“Easy! Easy! All of you back up.” Vex. She easily cuts through the noise and starts shoving the others around, moving them not with any of her own bodily strength but just her own assurety and force of will. “She needs space, come on now.”
“Space?” Percy protests, even as he takes an obedient step back. “She looks like a stiff breeze will drop her. Pike, can’t you—?”
“Of course,” Pike says and comes forward.
Keyleth’s brain is shorting, so much stimulation, positive for once, but still too much. She can’t believe she’s here. They’re all such a sight, such a comfort, she wants to be looking at all of them at the same time. Instead her eyes ricochet around the room and she can barely get them to focus.
Pike reaches up, a small hand touching her cheek and keeping her head and gaze in place.
“Hey, Keyleth,” she says brightly. Her other hand goes up to the symbol around her neck and the warm honey rush of her healing pours over and into her. “How are you doing?”
“Not too bad,” she croaks, because that’s what she usually says.
Be Keyleth, she reminds herself. Be Keyleth right now or why did you even come back.
Vax lets out a wet laugh behind her. She’s doing something right.
“We were trying to get to you, you know,” Pike says. She takes her hand and guides her slowly deeper into the room. Vax trails behind her like a shadow, hand hovering by the center of her back, close, so close, but not touching.
Vex shifts pillows around on the couch by the fire so there’s a place for her to sit comfortably. Not that it matters. Anything would be comfortable to her at this point.
“Oh, that’s okay,” she says, her voice is thready and high, the ghost of Keyleth breezing through her vocal chords. “I didn’t know how to get back until just now really.”
“How did you get back?” Grog asks. He stands further back in the room, out of the way and slumping slightly like he’s trying to seem smaller, unthreatening. She thinks that makes sense, Grog would know the most about dealing with wild animals.
She shrugs weakly and then her knees give out and she drops to a seat. “Magic.”
“Ah,” Grog says with a nod.
She slumps back against the couch and feels the energy drain out of every muscle in her body.
“She's getting Shadowfell muck all over your inheritance pillows, De Rolo.”
“Scanlan,” someone hisses. She can’t make out who.
Vax has dropped to his knees next to the couch. He’s still not touching her anymore, but he’s still so close, the line of his body inches parallel to her leg, his knuckles on the seat almost almost almost brushing against her thigh.
He stares up at her like she’s a miracle. She’s not sure what’s worse, that it’s far from the first time he’s looked at her this way, or that she finally knows for certain that he really shouldn’t.
“Hi,” she says, again, staring down at him. She doesn’t know how to get her mouth around the rest of what she’s thinking, what she should say.
“Hi,” he says back, which is kind of him.
He looks different. Maybe it’s just been a while, but also, no, she’s spent every night for all those weeks tracing each of their faces in her head over and over again, and Vax’s especially. He is different. His face is paler, the lines of his face seem heavier, something shifted in his eyes. He’s wearing new armor, dark black and feathered at the shoulders. It smells like mothballs. Her nose wrinkles slowly.
“How are you?” she asks. An argument is happening in whispers over her head. They’re heads, really, a different world from whatever is happening here, as she grasps at the concept of herself again.
“I don’t know,” he replies with a wet laugh. He barely blinks, his eyes locked onto hers like he’s drinking in every last detail and memorizing each inch of her face.
Her mouth stretches weirdly. A smile. There might still be blood in her mouth. Some of it might not be hers.
It still feels good.
“Me neither,” she says.
His hand shifts, perching lightly like a bird on her knee. It feels heavier than that, feels grounding, like a weight keeping her from flying away, like a tether to this world, this plane, to keep her from disappearing again.
She lets her hand rest on top of his, and allows herself to believe it. She’s home.